DANIEL CRAIG CONTINUED
him having amphetamine and speed and
doing all these things. But inside, I know
I’m doing that. And I wanted to inform the
part and say that’s what he is. He’s kind of a
fuckup. Because this job would fuck you up.”
The screen test was a whole deal. A stage at
Pinewood. Lights, crew, makeup. A half-day
shoot. The director, Martin Campbell—who
shot GoldenEye in 1995 and went on to make
Casino Royale—asked Craig to walk over to
a fruit bowl and toss a grape into his mouth.
Craig refused. “I just went, ‘No.’ I said, ‘No, I
can’t.’” The two men argued. “I’m not going
to do it. You do that,” Craig said. “It was about
‘How am I going to be James Bond?’”
From then on, and during the making of
Casino Royale, a strange dynamic set in. The
more that Broccoli and Wilson saw of Craig on
camera, the more excited they became.“You
just look in those eyes and you know he’s
capable of doing anything,” Broccoli said.
The rest of the world, however, was basically
in uproar. It’s easy to forget, some 15 years
later, quite how badly Craig’s casting went
down—especially in Britain, where James
Bond is considered, like the royal family or
the England soccer team, to be more or less a
publicly owned piece of the national culture.
It was very quickly determined that Craig was
the wrong guy. No one had heard of him. If
they had, it was from arty, challenging films
like Love Is the Devil or The Mother, in which
he plays a carpenter who starts sleeping with
a woman in her 60s.
On October 14, 2005, Craig alighted on the
banks of the River Thames from a Royal Navy
assault craft to be introduced to the world
as the sixth James Bond. He was wearing a
life jacket. He wasn’t particularly tall. One of
the few things that the British tabloids knew
about Craig, who was married for two years
in his 20s, was that he liked to party. At the
press conference, he was asked whether he
would prefer Sienna Miller or Kate Moss,
whom he was rumored to have slept with, as
a Bond girl. (Craig declined to answer.) And
then there was his hair. It seems absurd now,
and the color has faded somewhat over the
years, but at his unveiling, Craig was flaxen.
His hair was like summer straw. Fleming’s
Bond might be an enigma, but his dark hair
was an immutable fact.
Outraged fans set up websites—blond
notbond.com, danielcraigisnotbond.com—
to register their displeasure. “The Name’s
Bland—James Bland,” ran the front page of
the Daily Mirror. There was talk of a boycott.
When shooting for Casino Royale began,
paparazzi stalked the set. In the Bahamas,
photographers buried themselves overnight
on the beach, like turtles’ eggs. “It was all-
over-the-world news,” Broccoli recalled.
“Everything was saying that he was not
right for the role.” It got to Craig. He called
Olivia. “I remember saying to my mum,
‘Can I play James Bond?’” Craig told me.
“And she was like, ‘Of course you can. But I am
your mother.’”
Away from the madness, though, there
was lots about Casino Royale that felt right.
The script, by experienced Bond writers
Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with
Paul Haggis, who had written Million Dollar
Baby, hewed close to the Fleming original.
The story focused on a high-stakes poker
game, updated for the 9/11 era, in aid of ter-
rorist financing. For a Bond movie, Casino
Royale was quietly revolutionary. There was
no Q dishing out gadgets, no flirting with
Moneypenny, and scarcely a one-liner. Early
in the film, Craig drives a Ford Mondeo and
is mistaken for a parking valet, ignominies
unthinkable for Roger Moore. Craig bulked
up for the filming, and for the first time James
Bond’s body became an object of fascination.
His emergence from the aquamarine sea, all
muscle and swimming trunks, evoked Ursula
Andress and her white bikini from Dr. No,
44 years earlier. Craig’s physicality spoke in
other ways too. He performed many of his own
stunts. His Bond became a tryer; he wasn’t so
insouciant. He had a thick neck. He vomited.
He ran through a wall.
More than anything, though, Craig’s Bond
was capable of emotion. His scenes with M,
played by Judi Dench, rang with vulnerabil-
ity. “She’s Mum. It’s as simple as that,” Craig
said. “He loves her as much as he has loved
anybody.” (Olivia had a picture of Dench on
the fridge in Liverpool when Craig was grow-
ing up.) Bond’s relationship with Vesper
Lynd, meanwhile, has the heft of a genuine
love a≠air. He talks about getting out of the
spy game. My memory of watching Casino
Royale is of the wholly new feeling of want-
ing James Bond to be happy. Of course, he
can’t be. As in the book, Lynd betrays Bond
and gets killed in the end. “The bitch is dead,”
Bond says. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the star of
Fleabag, who worked on the script of No Time
To Die, was struck by a new complexity in
Craig’s performance. “He let us in a bit, which
makes the moments he shuts us out even more
arresting,” she told me in an email. “Overall he
grounded a fantasy character in real emotion,
which is what I think we hadn’t realised we’d
missed amongst the action and the bravado.”
The premiere was at the Odeon Leicester
Square, in London’s West End, in November- The Queen came. The lights dimmed.
The opening sequence is shot in black and
white. Craig is sitting in a darkened o∞ce in
Prague. There is a flashback to his first kill,
a drowning in a sink, a moment of vividly
performed violence for a Bond movie. The
audience laughed. Then Bond shoots a rogue
British agent. The audience laughed again.
In his seat, Craig started to panic. “I went,
‘Oh...,’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck,’” he said. Then
the opening credits rolled, the music played,
and the crowd cheered. He realized that they
liked him.
When Craig described this moment to me,
13 years later, in a hotel room in New York City,
he started to cry. There was an unopened bot-
tle of Champagne and two glasses on a table by
the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “All the pressure
suddenly was... Because the whole thing of,
‘He’s not right...’ I intellectualized all of it.” He
said: “I know why they don’t like me. I know
why I don’t like me. So I know why they don’t
fucking like me.”
Casino Royale was a hit around the world.
It became the biggest-grossing Bond film to
date. But the relief that Craig felt upon being
accepted by a skeptical British public was
particular. Britain has a complicated attitude
toward its heroes, even fictional ones. “I don’t
really quite understand it,” Craig told me. “But
in Britain, it really fucking matters, and we
nailed it.” Craig was the first Bond actor to be
nominated for a BAFTA. He remembered all
the 007 movies that came out when he was
growing up as a kid. “Even when they were
bad, it was still an event,” he said. “You still
went. For it to be good and for people to go—
fuck yes.”PHILIP LARKIN WAS a James Bond fan. In
1981, the poet wrote about Fleming’s novels
for The Times Literary Supplement. “What
strikes one most about his books today is their
unambiguous archaic decency,” Larkin wrote.
“England is always right, foreigners are always
wrong.” During Craig’s years in the part, the
world and Britain’s place in it have changed.
When Casino Royale was released, Tony Blairwas in 10 Downing Street and Donald Trump
was on The Apprentice. The risk of a financial
crisis was minimal. Brexit was not a word.
In 2012, Craig filmed a skit with the Queen
for the opening ceremony of the Olympic
Games in London. Bond and Her Majesty
strode through Buckingham Palace, corgis all
around. They climbed into a helicopter and
appeared to parachute down over the Olympic
stadium while the Bond theme tune dang-
danged around. Craig compared the experi-
ence to swimming o≠ a beautiful beach and
staring back at the shore in wonder. “I look
around and I go, ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’” he
said. If you watch the footage now, everything
looks so innocent and long ago.
Craig introduced time to the Bond mov-
ies. Before him, the character, and his world,
simply regenerated from film to film. The
padded-leather door to M’s o∞ce swung open.
In Craig’s films, which are loosely serialized,
Bond ages and Britain has aged. There is such
thing as doubt. England isn’t necessarily right.
Foreigners aren’t necessarily wrong.
When Casino Royale wrapped, Craig had
a sense of where he thought the overall story
should go. “The biggest ideas are the best,” he
told me. “And the biggest ideas are love and
tragedy and loss. They just are, and that’s what
I instinctively want to aim for.” After the death
of Vesper Lynd, he wanted Bond to shut down,
lose everything, and over the course of sev-
eral adventures, gradually find himself again.
“I think we’ve done it, with No Time To Die,”
Craig said. “I think we’ve got to this place—
and it was to discover his love, that he could
be in love and that that was okay.”
The challenge has been to reverse engineer
that long, somewhat complex arc through
speedboat chases, lethal poisonings, explod-
ing hotels, beautiful women, a touch of skiing,APRIL 2020 GQ.COM 95
“We struggled to keep Trump
out of this film,” Craig said.
“But of course it is there. It’s
always there, whether it’s
Trump, or whether it’s Brexit,
or whether it’s Russian
interference on elections.”